Evangelical students make up larger and larger portions of the incoming classes at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. They join robust campus-ministry groups that sponsor everything from debates to spring-break "mission" trips. And while they still fall slightly below the national average, the percentage of evangelicals receiving bachelor's degrees has climbed 133 percent from 1976 to 2004...
The author's research also indicates that more evangelical scholars are playing important roles in the academic discussion of resurgent religious issues and topics, and in other areas of research and inquiry as well, including science. And he tries to place it all in historical perspective:
The "opening of the evangelical mind," as Alan Wolfe has aptly called it, may be surprising to some, but it is not unprecedented. Indeed anti-intellectualism within Christianity is actually an anomaly of the 20th century. [Italics added.] For most of Christianity's history, faith and learning have been intertwined. Over the centuries, intellectuals received religious sanction for their scholarly pursuits, and the church in both Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions supported a range of intellectual activity, from the scientific research of Newton to the literary contributions of Chesterton. History is on the side of evangelical intellectual strivings.
The author goes to some lengths to rightly note that evangelicals are a more complicated, less homogeneous, and much misunderstood patchwork quilt of believers. Most are not right-wing Republicans, he asserts, and most are not fundamentalists. But the author clearly spends more time addressing evangelicals in academic environments than in Main Street evangelical churches and ministries. And he tends to want to see all expressions of evangelical Christianity as benignly and charitably as he perceives those in academe:
Unlike fundamentalists who retreat from pluralistic environments, evangelicals relish the chance to engage people who hold different beliefs. This could present an opportunity for deeper understanding on our campuses, but it will happen only if we bring evangelicals into our classroom discussions. Just as the debate surrounding intelligent design has forced many biologists to engage religious topics in the classroom, so will rising religious pluralism.
But he fails to recognize that, in Main Street America, the fundamentalists and political operatives have so infiltrated or taken the lead among the most public evangelical voices that much of the general public now considers the terms fundamentalist, Christian Right and evangelical as interchangeable. And if those types of evangelicals also "relish the chance to engage people who hold different beliefs," it is most often not with a tolerant or open mind. That is a reality in too many evangelical churches. But, as the author suggests, it is not true of many more. And I applaud him for his upstream battle against this public confusion and misperception. But at critical points, I fear he is more describing his ideal--and mine--than reality:
Nearly every evangelical scholar I encountered embodies a "cosmopolitan" evangelical faith. They are "worldly" believers, in the best sense of the term. They regularly rub shoulders with people of different faiths and of no faith at all. They aim not to "take back" the country for their faith, but simply want their faith to be seen as reasonable, genuine, and attractive.
But neither the evangelical scholars and students he describes approvingly, nor their respectful approach to the pluralistic academic environment of various faiths and no faith, fairly represent the more dominant, aggressive and judgmental social and political agendas of the most public evangelical voices.
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=MJkHPtFJgVzccg6S9G9ZTKyGtpqshxgT
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